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Twitter to launch election site tonight

MG SieglerSeptember 25, 2008 6:05 PM

Longtime users of the micro-messaging service Twitter may have noticed something around the start of the political primary season: A lot of tweets (Twitter messages) about politics. To some this is annoying, to others, it’s addicting. Tonight, Twitter will acknowledge how big the interest is around the topic of politics by launching a new sub-site to Twitter called Election2008, according to The New York Times’ political blog, The Caucus.

Starting at midnight, election.twitter.com will go live and will feature an interface that regular Twitter users will instantly recognize. There will be one major difference however. Gone is the famously outdated question “What are you doing?” (Twitter was initially just about people saying what they were doing); it’s been replaced with “What do you think?”

The idea of course, is to get people’s opinions on political topics, the candidates and larger issues like the economy. It’s no coincidence that the site is launching on the eve of the first debate between Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain. Twitter has made note of the surges it’s seen during the primary debates and more recently the DNC and RNC national convention key speeches.

Of course, if McCain has his way, there won’t be a debate tomorrow night — so you can expect a lot of tweets about that on Twitter’s election site if nothing else.

The new site will let users easily filter for messages related to certain candidates. It will also highlight tweets from the candidates themselves (or at least their representatives).

I asked Twitter how exactly the new election site will tie in to Twitter proper, and Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey confirmed that any tweets made on election.twitter.com will tie into the regular Twitter site, so those who don’t make the jump to the new site won’t be totally left out of the action.